My Apple PowerBook running OS X v10.4.9, with a Commodore 64 (playing "Leather Goddesses of Phobos"), FreeBSD 6.2, Windows 2000 Professional, and BeOS R5.0.3 all running simultaneously under emulations; download the wallpaper!

I've been referring to myself as the Twenty-First Century Schizoid Man (after the King Crimson song) since early 1999; finally, the first half is accurate. I've been a technophile much longer than that, though. I got my first computer, a Timex Sinclair 1000, sometime around 1983. No hard drive, no sound, no color...  lol  It was soon upgraded to a Commodore VIC-20, and a few years after that, I got a Commodore 128. Woo-hoo!

These machines were a lot of fun and fascinating to work with, but I didn't settle for just buying and playing games on them. I learned BASIC and the concepts behind programming, then set out writing my own simple games, date calculators, graphing programs... the first worthwhile word processor I ever used on the VIC-20 was one I wrote myself, from scratch, that handled page numbers, subscripts, superscripts, and footnotes with ease. When I took a computer class in my junior year in high school (just looking for more math credits), I became an unofficial teacher's assistant, helping out with students less computer-literate. As we were working with Commodore PETs, I was already comfortable with the equipment and the version of BASIC.

In late 1993, I began thinking about getting a 'serious' computer. I'd done a lot with the 128, and had even put its simple (but impressive for its time) synthesizer to use by programming the rhythm section from "Rainbow Connection" painstakingly, one note at a time, and accompanying the resulting music on guitar. One of the last, best software packages I got for the Commodore was GEOS, a graphical user interface, but I didn't play with it enough and never quite realized its potential. I did realize, however, that the computer was an antiquated relic now, at least for me, and there was so much more I could do with a more powerful and modern computer. I toyed with the idea of getting one of Commodore's Amigas, having heard good things about them, but this was around the time that the company started going under. Eventually I decided on a Macintosh.

I had of course heard good things about Apple as well. The Mac's dominance in audio applications probably played a role in my decision, though I didn't truly utilize its capabilities in that area for two years or so. In any case, having worked on a Windows box for a few months at my place of employment, I could see that Mac was where it was at (and that Microsoft had seen that, too, in its plundering of the GUI), so in January of 1994, I purchased a Performa 550, which was promptly dubbed VAL 9000 (in honor of HAL 9000 and his 'sister' SAL 9000, from Arthur C. Clarke's books).

In retrospect, I could have picked a better Apple. The PowerPC-based Power Macintoshes were just being introduced, and while many of the Performas were being touted as PowerPC-upgradeable, Apple soon pulled the plug on that program for several models, including the 550. After about three years, the 160 MB hard drive also started feeling claustrophobic. (Funny, in retrospect; at the time of this writing, I've recorded songs that have required more than 160 MB of storage space!) But, with some extra RAM, and a lot of time and patience, I've accomplished a lot with VAL.

In the fall of 1998, I bought one of several used no-name PCs my employer was selling cheap. Its 100 MHz Pentium processor, while lethargic by then-current standards, ran circles around VAL's 33 MHz 68LC30, even if it was running a Microsoft operating system. After some thought, I named the the computer Yoko. Heh-heh... I bought a second Zip drive, so each computer had its own. Less than a year later, in August of 1999, I purchased a used Power Macintosh 6100/60 through Yahoo!'s auction system. It had a respectable 60 MHz first-generation PowerPC chip inside. Paulene was named for an old X song; yes, my computers are all female, aren't yours? ;) I bought a CD-R drive for the PC, which was a definite plus. Finally, I could store data on CDs when the five hard drives I now owned started getting full.

I looked the impending twenty-first century firmly in the eye, however, when Dana, my Graphite iBook SE, arrived via Airborne Express on October 10, 2000. Her 466 MHz G3 processor blew away the three older computers' brains put together. With 320 MB of RAM, an internal CD-ROM/DVD-ROM player, an external FireWire CD-R/W drive, a FireWire scanner, an iMic audio interface for recording, an Airport (Wi-Fi) card, and several operating systems from which to choose, this was one lean mean machine!  ;)  The iBook was my main computer almost from the day I received it until I bought a PowerBook in 2005, and I don't know how I survived without a laptop; I've worked on my Web site, my writing, even my music and documents for my job on the bus to and from work. I had to replace the battery twice, but otherwise I had no serious issues with Dana, and while she's no longer my primary computer, the iBook still runs fine and gets used on occasion.

When Dana started acting up in early 2005, I decided not to wait for a PowerBook G5 to hit the market after all (there was no timeline for one, and as we now know, Apple announced its decision to switch from PowerPC processors to [gasp] Intel shortly thereafter), and welcomed Trinity, a 12" PowerBook G4, to the menagerie. I'm very pleased with this new laptop, and I've loaded it with commercial and open source software and 1.5 GB of RAM.

I acquired a Commodore Amiga 3000 which I never got around to naming; while it was booting just fine when I purchased it, my attempt to upgrade the Kickstart ROMs has apparently disabled it. D'oh! Maybe I'll be able to get it running again someday... In the meantime, I got my hands on another one, and that Amiga, Amiable, is still functioning normally. For nostalgia's sake, I picked up a used Commodore 128 (dubbed Lisa, to the probable chagrin of Steve Jobs) and a 1571 floppy drive, too; now I can play Hitchhiker's Guide and Leather Goddesses of Phobos again! All the boxes and OSes (except the 128) are connected to the 'Net thanks to my Airport Extreme Base Station and its built-in network address translation (NAT). So, yes, I now have twelve functioning computers (fourteen if you count the Treo 600 and the iPhone!), covering a wide range of platforms, processors, and OSes. Why? Because I can, and because I happen to like computers and learning how they work. Even the ones with command-line prompts.